Propaganda by earthlings for earthlings
by
SELİM SAVAŞ GENÇ*

 The subject of the traitors was followed by a deep interest in the style adopted by a country like the US and claims that were to a great degree based on rumors. Debates regarding who the secret but not private information (the Guardian’s wonderful fixation) benefited and who it damaged took place after the initial shock.

When we look at the tentative official distribution of the documents released to global networks, it is clear that capitals with active policies, whether positive or negative, in the international system stand out more. While Russia, Iran and Turkey compete for the top, Germany, Italy and France are among the countries that have managed to pass the threshold.

In brief, the world public’s general attitude is that the documents are real but the information has not been proven. The personal assessments of diplomats that were based on hearsay, rumors and narrations devoid of analysis were shared in an American-style of frivolity. It is not sensible to look at the style of the documents to measure the US’s power. Putting every type of information, whether correct or false, into the same basket might be a different method used by the US, which collects more intelligence than all other countries and needs this information more than all other countries. Sorting the collected information and categorizing it in order of importance looks like it is something Washington prefers to do. If you look closely, none of the released information is top secret. We should not look at the data with the feeling that we are reading the US’s heart. After all, we are talking about information that exactly 3 million US citizens have clearance to access. The fact that no information has been leaked from a platform that can be accessed by exactly 3 million Americans until now can actually be considered an achievement.

The aspect of the reports that deserve the most criticism is the lack of a consistent level and standard use of style. Some of the reports consist of important and serious assessments, while some are full of manipulative rumors. There isn’t a single sentence that is relatively positive about the prime minister other than that he is a workaholic family man.

OK, so we’ve criticized American diplomats. Their style was bad, they had no sense of control over information, no standards and they did a lot of gossiping. If we were to make a comparison based on an argument to the contrary, then we should ask what all the Turkish diplomats that have been assigned to different parts of the world do. Do our diplomats make regular visits to other people, collect data and relay it to Ankara? How many Turkish diplomats have local columnists, academicians and ministers as friends and can obtain information from them? Will Turkish diplomats go after bigger targets as Turkey’s vision expands? How much information do they know about the country they are working in compared to the intelligence they have on Turkish citizens living abroad? In other words, dear reader, when will we have our own WikiLeaks website? This is the critical question.

The release of these reports shows once again that the concept of privacy has been damaged. The US, which requires passengers to go through whole body scans at airports for security reasons, has been confronted with the fear of being exposed.

More paranoia and conspiracy theories  

Let’s make our own tally and see who lost and who won in this case. WikiLeaks, which caused an uproar in the world allegedly on the grounds of promoting transparency, will trigger more paranoia and conspiracy theories. Forget speaking to an American diplomat, you are going to feel uneasy conversing with an American citizen who sits next to you on a plane. As a result, neo-nationalists in Turkey, who get their energy from Erke Dönergeci -- a perpetual motion machine announced by Erke Research and Engineering Inc., which it claimed would put an end to global warming and wars but has yet to be produced -- will have to put their conspiracies about the son of Moses, moderate Islam and the children of Soros aside and develop new fairy tales.

The British say “curiosity killed the cat.” Our curiosity for that which is private is killing our healthy and accurate view of the world. The “new media” that uses privacy as a marketing tool seeks to control the state and influence the international system. It is held in esteem not so much because of the historical documents it released but because of our insatiable curiosity. As for the question of whether the world can handle the disclosure of close to 250,000 documents, the answer is in direct proportion to the level of curiosity.

Associate Professor İhsan Yılmaz said these reports have given us the opportunity to read a portion of America’s diplomatic mind. America is not the one and only. Just as there are diplomats who do their job very well, there are diplomats in every part of the world, including Washington, who disgracefully neglect their duties.

If the documents disclosed by WikiLeaks had been published as the memoirs of a diplomat and had not been linked to private government cables, a majority of us probably would not have even bothered to read them. The thing that we are persistently trying to perceive as important and interesting only because they are private and only because they have been stolen is nothing other than our own weaknesses.